Recent school and climate marches have evidenced that Europe’s youth is becoming increasingly engaged towards the fight against global warming. Educating future European citizens about climate emergency challenges is then essential to ensure a global awareness on the need to measure and reduce GHG emissions. The target of youth seems also critical to mobilize a greatest number of actors beyond the walls of schools in order to reach the targets fixed by the 2030 EU climate objectives. In that context, the CLICKS ON project aims to support awareness raising on climate emergency through the provision of an innovative pedagogical approach and the development and dissemination of a Climate change educational toolkit specifically designed for secondary schools. To develop such output, CLICKS ON will rely on the articulation of expertise of a high level consortium: the technical knowledge and methodologies on carbon accounting will be provided by the Association Bilan Carbone (coordinator of the project – France) and Avenir Climatique (France) and will be combined with the pedagogical experience and IT expertise of Design for Change (Spain), AMICUCCI (Italy) and from Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy). A secondary Spanish school, the Colegio Jesuitinas María Reina will be involved as partners and will represent the secondary schools’ interest in the project. The CLICKS ON project focuses on some specific target groups in secondary schools that are the students, the teachers, administrative non-educational (ANE) staff and the school leaders, with several aims that will impact them: i) to raise awareness on climate issues and carbon accounting among the greatest number of students, teachers, school leaders and ANE staff, ii) to develop and offer a Climate change educational toolkit replicable at a European scale, iii) to harmonize and share at the European level educational materials, experiences and practices related to the climate emergency and carbon accounting. It will involve 7 schools (6 associated and 1 partner) that will test the project outputs: 3 schools in France, 2 in Italy and 2 in Spain. On the total, 14 teachers, 7 ANE staff, 7 school leaders and 260 students will be involved in the project. The main project output will be a Climate change educational toolkit available in 4 languages (French, Spanish, Italian and English) that supports students from secondary school to launch initiative to change behaviour and contribute to the low-carbon transition of their establishments. This initiative will entail the calculation of the carbon footprint of their establishments by students themselves, that can be based on the main emissive activities (light initiative) or on all activities (complete initiative) and on the definition and implementation of mitigation action plans to reduce this carbon footprint. Based on a common innovative pedagogical approach (IO1), this toolkit will be designed during the project and will be composed of i) a Facilitator package for teachers and ANE staff, to help students and facilitate the implementation of the initiative (IO2) and ii) a Student kit (IO3 and IO4) that will provide students with the necessary tools to launch the initiative: teaching content, the digital calculator, guidelines for defining and implementing mitigation action plan as well as a gamification module to follow their progresses. This toolkit will be completed by the creation of a website proposing technical content as well as the creation of an online community of users, to support further replication and use of the project toolkit (IO5). The project will last 3 years: the first year will entail the development and test of the Facilitator Package by teachers and ANE staffs that will be facilitators of the first round of experiment of the students, testing on their side the Student kit ; then, a second round of experiment during the second project year where teachers, ANE staff and students will be more autonomous and will go deeper into the initiative. The final year will allow the compilation of the Climate change educational toolkit and large replication of the initiative in the schools associated and in new schools. At short term, CLICKS ON will reinforce teachers’ and ANE staff’s knowledge on climate change issues and on the way to become facilitators of initiative to engage in low-carbon transition. Students, on their side, will gain soft skills and being real actors of the initiative will become real vectors of behavioural change. Based on the online community of users, the project will also have a high potential for replication and further use of the toolkit in the schools already involved, in new schools from the region and even at the national scale. Finally, at long term the project implementation may also impact the content of educative programme of secondary schools to better tackle the climate change challenges and reinforce the citizen behaviour of both students and teachers.
To reach carbon neutrality goals and its related objectives, the consortium has decided to develop some innovative methods. It means applying design thinking for secondary school students, their teachers, heads of schools and non-educational school staff. Those methods should trigger a significant change in favour of low carbon transition. The Clicks On project aims to get target groups, meaning secondary school students, teachers and non-educational staff, more sensitive to climate change issues. The learning focuses on carbon accounting for everyone to get involved in GHG emissions’ reduction. The main consortium’s objective was to create a pedagogical toolbox allowing teachers to carry out an autonomous project with their students over a school year. It concerns the fundamentals of climate change, counting the carbon footprint, elaborating an action plan to reduce the GHG’s school emissions.
The last ten years are notable through the advent of civilians’ rallying regarding climate issues. The youngest have been particularly involved through climate marches. The Clicks on project has been developed to satisfy the last generations’ growing interest, focusing on secondary schools. Its aim was to provide teachers and their students with the useful tools and knowledge to be able to tackle the GHG issue in their own school. The youngest could thus benefit from the challenging Clicks on project to support their committed actions.